“I think the price is fair,” he said. “Might be a little low. I dunno. Waterfront in Chester being what it is, you could get a lot more if you sold the whole damn thing, let them put condos up here. But I don’t see you doing that. I could make regular payments if you thought this cheque wasn’t quite enough.”
“No,” said Charlie. “Jeez, no. I think that price is prob’ly too high. I just want to make sure that it’s the right thing for you.”
Scarnum looked at him. “Might be nice for you and Annabelle to go away for a break,” he said. “I bet she’d like that. She’s always wanted to go to France.”
He laughed then. “I like the idea of you wandering around France.”
Charlie sang a fragment of an old song then — “Inky dinky parlez-vous!” — and danced a little cancan in the boat, and Scarnum laughed until the tears streamed down his face.
They finished their glasses and Scarnum refilled them and they drank those, too, and Charlie went up and brought Annabelle down and they signed a rough contract there, on the piece of graph paper that Scarnum had used to sketch the yard, and Annabelle took a little bit of the whisky, with a lot of water, and she and Scarnum spoke French to each other for a while, and she told Scarnum how her mother had been to Paris when she was a girl and how she herself had always wanted to go, so badly that she didn’t even want to explain to Charlie because she knew they couldn’t afford it, and she was very happy that now she could finally plan a trip, which she would probably enjoy more than the trip itself, knowing what snobs the real French were, and Charlie looked on in smiling incomprehension, and they drank the whole fucking bottle of whisky.
Thursday, December 23
THE BABY WAS JIMMY ZINCK'S boy. There could be no doubt of that. He had the same meaty face, the same long nose, and he was a screamer.
He was big, too, and healthy. Ten pounds, eight ounces.
“I woulda liked if he was a little smaller, tell you the truth,” Angela said to Scarnum, holding the boy in her arms and nuzzling him. “God knows what you did to my coochie, huh? Huh? Whatchyou do to your momma’s coochie?”
When she first came back to Chester, after Scarnum gave her the all-clear, they had spent the odd night together, making love on Scarnum’s V-berth and in his salon, and — one warm night, anchored in the bay — on the deck, but they could both tell that although the affection they felt for one another was real, it was not strong enough for them to live together as man and woman.
Angela called them “fuck buddies,” but as her pregnancy moved along they became just buddies, and Scarnum suspected they would remain just buddies now that little Jimmy Junior was outside of his mother, although he also suspected he would try to change her mind about that when he was drinking.
Scarnum cradled the boy for a while, and asked Angela about her plans for raising him, and promised to be little Jimmy’s Uncle Phil, said he was looking forward to it, which was true.
Then he took out the envelope from Pangiatapolis Securities Limited, and took out the form and filled in Jimmy Zinck’s name as the beneficiary, and his birth date, and showed it to her, and explained that she would get a cheque every month until the kid turned eighteen, at which point half of the money that was left would go to him. He’d get the rest at twenty-five.
Angela cried and hugged him for a long time, pulled him into the hospital bed with her. When she stopped crying, he whispered in her ear, “It’s the money from the coke, all of it. It’s what Jimmy died for. You ever tell anyone where it came from, they might kill me.”
On his way home, he picked up a bottle of Laphroaig and drank some of it by himself, feeding the wood stove in the boat shed and looking out through his new picture window at the black water of the bay.
Friday, December 24
SCARNUM WAS AT THE salon table on the Orion, taking little sips from a glass of Laphroaig and fussing with the plans for renovations to the boat shed, when Annabelle banged on the boat and called out to him.
“C’est Karen au phone,” she said. “Elle est en France. Elle dit que j’devrions la visiter quand j’y allons!”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?” he said.
To Karen, when he picked up the phone, he said, “Merry Christmas. It’s already Christmas there, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” she said. “It’s been Christmas here for half an hour. This phone call is my Christmas gift to myself.”
“Aren’t you just as sweet as pie, me duckie,” he said in a thick South Shore accent, and they laughed.
“So, where are you?”
“I’m in Collioure,” she said. “In the south of France.”
“The place Matisse liked,” said Scarnum. “That must be very beautiful.”
“Oh, it is,” she said. “It’s a bit chilly this time of year, but life here is very very pleasant. Art. Wine. Cuisine. Scenery. It’s got a soft, civilized quality that I am finding very, uh, relaxing after Chester.”
“Are you painting?”
“Yes, I am, a bit, but it hasn’t really opened up to me yet,” she said. “I think I have to learn to see this place first. Walking a lot. There’s lovely seaside walks, with half-wild goats and the Mediterranean lapping against chalk cliffs.”
She laughed. “It’s tough to take. So, how are you?”
“Good,” said Scarnum. “Things have kind of, uh, settled down around here. Finally got the salvage cheque from the Kelly Lynn, and I bought the end of Charlie’s boatyard, from the boat shed down. Put in a big picture window so I can look right out over the water.”
“Good for you!” she said.
“Angela had her baby this week,” he said. “Jimmy Zinck Junior. Looks just like his dad. Ten pounds, eight ounces. Mother and baby both well. I’m gonna be little Jimmy’s Uncle Phil.”
“Oh my God,” said Karen. “I should send a present.”
“Send a painting of the Riviera,” said Scarnum.
“I will,” she said. “My first good one.”
“That would be grand,” said Scarnum. “It would look right nice next to Angela’s picture of dogs playing poker.”
They laughed.
“Uh, Phil,” said Karen. “I got something to tell you.”
Scarnum swallowed and walked over and looked out the window. “Shoot,” he said.
“I’m going to have a baby, too.”
Then she rushed the rest before he could speak. “I’m due in April. The father is Sebastian. He has a gallery here, where he sells terrible landscape paintings, some of which he paints himself, to the tourists. He’s Catalan, bald, with a little potbelly. Likes to go spearfishing in the bay. Drinks too much wine, sings opera all the time, goes in and out of key.”
She stopped and Scarnum gave a little strangled whoop of pleasure.
“Holy Jesus!” he said. “Well, that is fantastic. You’re going to be a great mother. You deserve it, Karen. You deserve to be happy.”
“So do you, Phillip,” she said, and he could hear her crying softly down the line, all the way from France.
“You know what, Buttercup?” he said. “I think I am.”
Acknowledgements
I’D LIKE TO THANK Ewen Wallace, who helped me bring my Tanzer 7.5 through the Sambro Ledges on a cold day in the spring of 2003, Dan Leger and Andrew Murphy, who helped me write about sailing through the passage, and David Trenbirth and various Halifax Murphys and Sadlers who taught me to sail. Dave Gray, of Sambro Head, was kind enough to tell me some things about fishing.
Derek Delamere, Elaine Tough, Dave O’Neil, and Teri Donovan were kind to me when I was writing in Chester.
Chris Bucci and Anne McDermid, of Anne McDermid Agency, and Laura Boyle, Allison Hirst, Kirk Howard, and Kathryn Lane, of Dundurn Press, helped make this manuscript into a book.
Many friends read Salvage and gave me helpful advice: Anne Bernays, Richard Greene, Mark Hamilton, Vero Laffargue, Rena Langley, Kelly Maher, Barry Moores, the late Jane Purves and Leslie Stojsic.
Nicolas C
heradame and Ralph Surrette helped me with the French. Andrew Grant and Camille Labchuk helped me understand legal procedures.
Camille helped me in many other ways, with the book and lots of other things, brightening my days.
Copyright © Stephen Maher, 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Project editor: Kathryn Lane
Copy editor: Michelle MacAleese
Design: Laura Boyle
Cover design: Laura Boyle
Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy
Cover image: © Dmytro Tolokonov/ 123RF.com
The lyrics on page 183 are from the Stan Rogers song “45 Years,” from his 1976 album Fogarty’s Cove. They are printed with the permission of D. Ariel Rogers, President, Fogarty’s Cove Music.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Maher, Stephen, 1965-, author
Salvage / Stephen Maher.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4597-3451-7 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-4597-3452-4 (pdf).--ISBN 978-1-4597-3453-1 (epub)
I. Title.
PS8626.A41725S24 2016 C813’.6 C2015-908166-1
C2015-908167-X
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and Livres Canada Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Thursday, April 22
Friday, April 23
Saturday, April 24
Sunday, April 25
Monday, April 26
Tuesday, April 27
Wednesday, April 28
Friday, April 30
Saturday, May 1
Monday, May 3
Sunday, August 22
Monday, September 6
Tuesday, October 19
Friday, October 22
Thursday, November 4
Thursday, December 23
Friday, December 24
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Salvage Page 19
